One of the show’s brilliant set designers is Tal, a nute—neither male nor female, genderless, a kind of sublimely beautiful living Brancusi sculpture who suffers the dangerous disapproval of yts pious neighbors. Astute and subtle Shaheen Badoor Khan, intended for a cabinet post in the Baharat government, falls in love with yt, with inevitable dire consequences when a Swedish-Afghani reporter is manipulated into revealing their delicate, perverse bond. A mysterious rising politician, N. J. Jivanjee, makes diabolical mischief, and sf habitués will guess why.
Meanwhile, an asteroid is found in controlled orbit near Earth with a machine inside, the Tabernacle, that seems to be twice as old as the solar system. Yet it displays slightly futuristic images of American scientists Thomas Lull and Lisa Durnau—colleagues and former lovers who run a vast, accelerated simulated world, Alterre—and an eerie young Indian woman, Aj, who has power over terrifying war machines and seems able to download a Google-grade data source into her brain. This list does not exhaust the cast of the novel, which is a large-scale braided creation as compulsive as the Town&Country soapi, and just as fractal, entwined and manipulated by events and powers beyond any individual’s ken.
Somehow, miraculously, McDonald holds it all together, weaves the threads into a pattern at once dazzling and satisfying. Is our universe no more stable and real, finally, than the disintegrating Alterre? “We rejoin the river of history,” says Mr. Chakraborty, of death, “our stories told and woven into the stream of time.” How deeply woven we learn only at the end of this remarkable novel. It is the story, as Najia reflects, of “an attempt by a djinn made of stories to understand something outside its mandalas of artifice and craft. Something it could believe it had not made up itself. It wanted the drama of the real, the fountainhead from which all story flows.” That is almost the definition of science fiction itself.
76
Philip Roth
The Plot Against America (2004)
ALTHOUGH SCIENCE FICTION still has more than a whiff of the unrespectable about it, literary mandarins such as Atwood (Entry 1), Chabon (Entry 88), Ishiguro (Entry 77), McCarthy (Entry 84) and Roth sometimes turn to sf themes, even if they don’t realize it. The most common form is the dystopia or apocalypse, where sf’s “If this goes on—” is usually given a flatfooted outing. Sometimes these efforts produce a successful crossover or “slipstream” novel, like those mentioned.
One form increasingly congenial to literary readers is the counterfactual, known by sf readers as alternate (more properly alternative) worlds, stories set against histories that never happened because some critical forking path led into a history where Hannibal thrashed Scipio Africanus, China declined to abandon its advanced seafaring technology, or black Africans colonized the Americas. History as thought-experiment. Literary writers rarely venture far into this multiverse, although Kingsley Amis allowed the Church of Rome to prevail in Britain in The Alteration, and Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada, or Ardor is a Russia, an Antiterra, without Leninist terror. Two notable alternative realities among our 101 books, by Philip Roth and Michael Chabon, present different outcomes to the fascist assault on Jews and other persecuted minorities in the wasteland heart of the 20th century.
Roth is perhaps today’s most distinguished American writer, so his novel of a USA deformed by Nazi sympathizers is at once a superb work of contemporary mimesis and a surprising, agile leap sideways into alternate history. Does that make it sf? No overt technological device drives this deviation from what actually happened. Roth does not even bother to provide a handwaving gesture towards fashionable theories of overlapping quantum many worlds, infinite in number, each at right angles to every other, the kind of thing we find in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials fantasy trilogy (1995-2000), let alone a critical time machine-engendered change as in Ward Moore’s Bring the Jubilee (1953) or Poul Anderson’s Time Patrol stories. Surely Roth would consider such apparatus unnecessary, jejune. He thought he was making it all up: “I had no literary models for reimagining the historical past.” Still, The Plot Against American can be read rewardingly as sf generously defined, akin to Philip K. Dick’s Hugo winning The Man in the High Castle (1962) with its occupied, divided postwar USA infested by fascist Germany and Japan.
In 1940, Franklin D. Roosevelt fails to gain his third term, defeated by Nazi-sympathizing, white supremacist celebrity aviator Charles A. Lindbergh. (In our world, certain Republican isolationists considered urging Lindbergh to run for the presidency. Struck by this historical morsel, Roth asked a classic sf question: “What if they had?”)[1] The narrator, in that pivotal year a 7-year old Jewish New Jersey boy named Philip Roth, is already aware of the same poisoning that blighted the author’s world: the racist automotive genius Henry Ford, the Jew-hating radio priest Father Coughlin, even some well-placed rabbis of his ancestral faith eager to placate their defamers. “To tell the story of Lindbergh’s presidency from the point of view of my own family,” Roth has remarked, “was a spontaneous choice. To alter the historical reality by making Lindbergh America’s 33rd president while keeping everything else as close to factual truth as I could—that was the job as I saw it.”
Unlike the balkanized America of Dick’s great novel, let alone the convulsive jolts and seismic upheavals of most sf alternate histories, Roth’s counterfactual clings closely to the world he knew, growing up, and like Sinclair Lewis’s famous It Can’t Happen Here (1935), shows that it can, and by what means. This is Isaac Asimov’s psychohistory in action, at the closest possible fine grain: sf not of physics but of the raw stuff of life and fluid personality under stress. (Curiously, the Jewish boy living downstairs, whose mother is beaten to death and incinerated by Klansmen, is named Seldon—although surely not for Asimov’s psychohistorian Hari Seldon.)
It is fascinating to watch Roth reinventing several road-tested and well-tuned sf devices. He keeps “the adult’s narrating voice explicit without its sounding didactic in recounting the imaginary historical events. After all, my reader can’t know anything of the history I’m inventing, there is no common knowledge that is complete, and so, though one can allude to Munich or to the Treaty of Versailles, one cannot allude to the Iceland Understanding (the 1941 nonaggression pact signed in Reykjavik by Lindbergh and Hitler) without spelling it out.”
By holding his focus so close to the child’s perspective—the boy’s obsession with stamp collecting, caring for his maimed warrior cousin Alvin’s suppurating stump—the larger utterance of history is allowed to unfold like a black and white newsreel projected in the background. The novel is precisely a fiction of the epoch of science and technology: the aircraft and mass media frenzies that enable Lindbergh’s fame and Hitler’s hypnotic, appalling rise, the mass deaths that blighted our world as well as the fictional Philip’s, the broadcasts and easy travel that facilitate the rise and rise (and eventual fall) of the loathsome opportunistic Rabbi Bengelsdorf, fiancé of Philip’s aunt Evelyn, head of the Office of American Absorption, “koshering Lindbergh for the goyim.”
Bengelsdorf institutes “Just Folks,” a scheme to decontaminate Jewish children by summering them with an isolated rural family. Philip’s older brother Sandy comes home from Kentucky a convert to middle American values; soon the Homestead ’42 program is uprooting ethnic enclaves and dispersing their minorities across the continent. Young Seldon and his family are relocated early, with tragic results. When finally the nation reels to its senses after Lindbergh vanishes, Roosevelt gets reelected. Chronology proceeds, for good and ill. It is a sort of inverse of Michael Chabon’s later The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007), where Jews are settled from around the world in Alaska.
This is history reflected in a blood drop. It is powerful, painful, suggesting one path along which tomorrow’s science fiction might proceed, away from galactic empire fantasies of Übermenchen (enjoyable as those can be) and into the complex ripeness of life.
[1] Philip Roth, “The Story Behind ‘The Plot Against America,’” New York Times September 19,
2004.
77
Kazuo Ishiguro
Never Let Me Go (2005)
WHEN NUANCED, Booker-winning Japanese-British author Kazuo Ishiguro published his novel of clones raised for organ-transplant—chosen by Time magazine as the best book of the decade—New York Times reviewer Sarah Kerr drew back her skirts in abject terror of pollution:
The setup is so shocking—in such a potentially dime-store-novel way—that it’s hard to believe at first that it issued from Ishiguro’s desktop. Has one of our subtlest observers gone to pulp? The novel is the starkest instance yet of a paradox that has run through all Ishiguro’s work. Here is a writer who takes enormous gambles, then uses his superior gifts to manage the risk as tightly as possible. The question is what he’s gambling on. Is he setting up house in a pop genre—the sci-fi thriller—in order to quietly upend its banal conventions….[1]
It was a moment of grim humor for sf readers, who were more likely to see the device of organ-farming as quietly upending the banal conventions of polite upper-middle class literary fiction. Certainly Ishiguro’s book is about as far from the thriller genre as one could get; there are no explosions, reckless car chases, ninja descents into secret laboratories, asteroid impacts. As a novel written for readers for whom, not many years ago, the notion of human cloning was utterly absurd, and is now at best disgusting and at worst metaphysically criminal, Never Let Me Go has shock value, although the idea of cloning reaches back in literature at least as far as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932).
In sf, organlegging was introduced and named by Larry Niven in the early volumes of his Known Space series in the 1960s. Sturgeon’s 1962 novella “When You Care, When You Love” visited this territory, as did John Boyd’s The Organ Bank Farm (1970), and so, more recently, did Michael Marshall-Smith’s grisly Spares (1996) and Bujold’s Vorkosigan universe (see Entry 19). These can be dismissed as banal pop genre product only at the cost of willfully ignoring thoughtful (and playful) presentations, in many superior sf works, of an important issue.
Even so, is Ishiguro’s novel really sf? As with much well-received literature bordering sf’s territory, we can reasonably ask if it makes the grade. If so, its literary qualities—the quiet, artfully unreliable presentation of awakening into maturity, into the unyielding and sometimes awful responsibilities of adulthood—make it instantly worthy of inclusion in any list of the great sf of the last quarter century. Or is cloning just a pallid, undeveloped and confused premise glued onto a conventional rite de passage? Stern custodians of the hard science fiction lineage will object that the scenario is preposterous: cloning for this purpose works only if each genetic twin is dedicated to the use of a single wealthy or powerful individual. Nor could organ transplants cure “cancer, motor neuron disease, heart disease.” Moreover, since the problems of histocompatibility have been overcome in this alternative history (it’s set in a 1990s where biological progress went faster and differently after the Second World War), surely it’s simpler, if no less morally reprehensible, to steal infants from orphanages, or the Third World, say, and mine them for organs? Or, as now, recover tissues from those dead in accidents?
This objection is perhaps unnecessarily severe. Terrible things have been done in the past on the basis of incompletely mastered technologies. In this parable, post-War British medicine seems to have taken paths mapped by Nazi experimenters, with all the self-serving moral blindness that implies. If cloning people allows citizens to enjoy longer and healthier lives, isn’t it all too dreadfully plausible that victims will be cast out, despised as “soulless” non-human? Make that leap (hardly more drastic than allowing time travel or faster than light starships in your fiction), and the book can be read—as can Philip Roth’s Nazified 1940s’ America (Entry 76), and Cormac McCarthy’s post-catastrophe future (Entry 84)—as a literary essay into territory long since pioneered by sf’s explorers.
In Hailsham, seemingly a quite lavish boarding school for wealthy children (although we see only the staff, never parents), Kathy H. makes her rather timid way toward a future of “donations,” carers and “completion.” We know at once that donation entails the removal of crucial organs, that carers look after clones already rifled while awaiting their own postponed but inevitable lethal fate, and that “completion” is a euphemism for death. Seen that way, it is a fable of life and death as we have always known it, as we try to avoid knowing it: the biological decay, ruin and surcease lying ahead of everyone except those who die even earlier than usual, and the misuse of some humans by others to make their own lives easier. The science fictional aspect sharpens our response to what everything in our culture trains us to avoid, which we either avert our eyes from or valorize as a kind of mysterious blessing that the mature should embrace.
Kathy’s best friend is the more outgoing Ruth, who first scorns Kathy’s interest in the bumbling, endlessly mocked Tommy, but ends by stealing him as her lover. As these seemingly privileged kids pass from the comforts of Hailsham to the far less pleasant Cottages, and finally to the hospitals where they suffer their predestined fate, their circumstances and small crises are observed with Ishiguro’s unrelenting eye. Their guardians, Miss Lucy, Mr. Frank, Nurse Trisha, Miss Geraldine of the art class, head guardian Miss Emily, the distant Madame who gathers their artwork for a supposed “Gallery,” are revealed through the children’s gaze. Madame, Ruth suggests, is scared of them, and they test this revulsion by intruding into her space. It is not fear, of course, as we can see, but a distancing mechanism any sensitive adult would have to adopt, faced with what amounts to Sophie’s Choice writ large.
These children, Kathy learns finally, were regarded by the world of naturals as “shadowy objects in test tubes without souls.” It is Ishiguro’s triumph to show exactly how wrong this estimate is, and must be, as we move in reality toward a future where such benighted attitudes might yet prevail alongside creationism, racism, and other absurd or malign myths.
[1]http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/17/books/review/17KERRL.html
78
Ian R. MacLeod
The House of Storms (2005)
HERE’S ALICE, in front of her mirror, about to enter Looking Glass land—yet she’s also the Wicked Queen, asking her mirror who’s the fairest of them all, ready to stamp her foot in rage and crush any upstart. England is divided down the middle, financial and judicial sophisticates to the right, rural and maritime toilers and thrusters to the left, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, eager to plunge into ruinous civil war. Here’s the hothouse city boy, fatally ill, falling in love with the unschooled seashore girl, buoyantly healthy. Here’s the great rotten trunk of authority mirrored by its own burgeoning but stifled seedlings. Here’s the fruit falling not far from the tree, into the same loam that fed the tree, yet growing aslant from heredity and nurture both. Or is it? Is the seed in the fruit determined by, and determining, all the long history of the tree and its blood-soaked soil?
These are archetypal oppositions, dichotomies, puzzles, reversals, storybook clichés meeting themselves like faces in a crazed mirror, unexpected yet inevitable, predictable as legend. The mood, of course, is melancholy. The telling is drawn-out, somber, steeped in long-shadowed afternoon light.
Ian R. MacLeod is a fine British writer of large ambition and copious talent. He has twice won the World Fantasy Award, two Asimov’s polls, as well as the Sideways Award and a Locus Poll award, and in 2009 the Clarke and the Campbell Memorial awards. Nick Gevers called The House of Storms (justly) “unfailingly elegant, full of brilliantly realized English landscapes, deftly sensitive characterizations, luminously reworked fairy tales, and poetic elegies to lives and opportunities lost.... The House of Storms is that uncommon thing, a sequel to be treasured as much as its precursor.”
That precursor was The Light Ages (2003), MacLeod’s first venture into an elaborately realized alternative history separated from our own in the 17th-century with the discovery of “aether,” a force or quintessence that powers a botched indu
strial revolution as dreadful as our own. It sustains cheap and shoddy workmanship, permits localized control of the weather, useful for a sea-going culture—and damages its luckless handlers as if it were a diabolical blend of radioactivity and chemical mutagens.
Aether is at once a science-fictional device and a ferocious figuration of the industrial process and its often inhuman side-consequences, its astonishing wealth, beauty, temptations, corrosive power. So this is not fantasy at all; while it’s not science, it’s assuredly science fiction.
In the earlier book, a poor Northern boy narrates his rise through a Dickensian world of squalor, horror and unbreakable hierarchy. A century later, this quasi-sequel tells the aching if rather too fairytale-like generational saga of the collapse of aether and the rise of electricity, the very force that in our world catalyzed versions of democracy and industrial totalitarianism alike, and the final triumph of mass consumerist culture.
So The House of Storms is not Dickensian, but perhaps Wellsian, not Victorian so much as Edwardian, with all the nasty poverty, pollution, bigotry, suppressed class hatred that would burn through into the First World War. Here it enacts in miniature a conflict between the great European powers, as a second English Civil War purportedly waged by the East against the West to end slavery in an underexploited Thule, our America. Inevitably, we read undertones of both the American War of Independence and its internecine War Between the States. A compressed allegorical weight is borne by the principal characters. Greatgrandmistress Alice Meynell is a beautiful wicked witch from the land of Grimms’ fairytales, a sort of Mrs. Coulter (from Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy): conscienceless, ambitious, murderous, yet strangely devoted to her ailing son Ralph. Alice comes by ill fortune from the wrong side of the money mirror. Born Alice Bowdly-Smart to a wealthy couple, she is plunged after their perhaps accidental deaths into poverty, makes her way as a sort of upmarket whore to London, ruins a grandee of the powerful Guild of Electricians and marries another, connives, kills, steals; in short, she is a sort of Becky Sharp (Thackeray’s Vanity Fair) who never comes a cropper.
Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 Page 27
